by Melody Raven
“Where is she?” said Derek, loud enough for Reyes to hear him as he went down the hallway.
Reyes turned his head and looked at Derek through narrowed eyes. “You brought her here.”
Derek pulled out his gun and aimed it right at Reyes’s head. The roar was now screaming at Derek. He knew he had to keep a cool head, but the alarm bells going off were making it almost impossible to remain calm.
Reyes didn’t seem disturbed by the gun at all. “Why did you bring her?”
“Where is she?” As far as Derek was concerned, Reyes was no longer a cop. He was just a criminal, and he didn’t answer criminal’s questions.
“I’m an unarmed cripple, Pierce. You going to shoot me next to a room full of cops? That would be evil.” On the last word, Reyes voice dropped down an octave to take on a distinctly inhuman quality. He was taunting Derek.
His fingers tightened on the butt of the gun, but he kept the trigger finger a safe distance from the trigger itself. “So she found you then. Did she piss you off? Why? She saved you. She saved us. If it weren’t for her, Collins would still be alive. So for the last time, tell me where she is.”
Reyes met Derek’s eyes and had the audacity to smile. “She deserves this. They all deserve this. I’m going to burn them off this earth one by one. I’m going to make all of them suffer. We’re going to show them that we will never be subverted again. Your girlfriend is gone. She belongs to us now, and by the time we’re done with her, there won’t be anything left.”
Through the crazy words, Derek connected it. Sam was Janet now. Reyes was using her to attack someone else.
Despite his rage, he forced himself to lower the gun. If he shot Reyes now, he’d never make it to Sam in time. “This isn’t over.” He turned. A glint of light in the corner of his eye caught his attention and he bent to pick up the bracelet now lying broken on the floor.
He pocketed it as he headed for the stairs. He already knew the next address on the list. Now he needed to get there before Sam did. Once he pushed open the door to the streets, he found the nearest valet worker. “This is my tag. I need you to give me my keys and tell me where the cars are.”
The young kid immediately paled. “Uhhh, that’s not really allowed.”
Derek wasn’t about to pull any punches. He grabbed his badge and held it just a few inches from the kid’s face. “See this badge? That means that if you don’t do exactly what I’m asking, I’m going to arrest you for obstruction. Now give me my keys and tell me where the damn car is.”
Three minutes later, Derek was pressing the unlock button on the keypad and following the direction of the flashing headlights. As soon as he was in the driver’s seat, he pulled out his phone.
Bastian answered on the second ring. “What’s wrong?”
Well, he had it right. Derek wouldn’t be calling unless something was really wrong. “I think Sam’s in trouble. I think she’s Janet now. I think Reyes is using her to start the next fire.”
“Where is she now?” asked Bastian. No nonsense. No asking about strange details. Just down to business. Derek didn’t want to like the man, but it was hard not to right now.
“I don’t know. By the time I found out she was gone, it was too late. But she doesn’t have much of a head start. And she’s barefoot.”
“Is she driving or on foot?”
“I don’t know. She could be in a cab at this point.”
“What direction are you coming from?”
“From the west.” But that didn’t mean anything. If Reyes really was controlling Sam, Derek didn’t know what that meant. Was she a mindless zombie? Was Reyes controlling her enough to speak and think coherently?
Then something came back to him. The tiniest detail that had slipped his notice before. She belongs to us now. Us. Who was Reyes working with?
“The residence has been evacuated,” said Bastian. “We’ve already attempted to mitigate the danger.”
Derek pulled onto the street and turned in the direction of the next address in Abigail Harris’s old address book. A townhouse in Brooklyn, but it was connected on each side by other residences. So if Sam burned it down, it wouldn’t just be one building in danger. The witches had attempted to mitigate the danger to any of their kind. Once again, humans were an afterthought.
Derek hit the gas. There were hundreds of ways to get from one place in New York to another. Guessing which streets or alleys she used would be nearly impossible.
But as Derek drove past one of the possible turnoffs, that annoying feeling in the pit of his stomach was back. Fuck. He slammed on the brakes and the car twisted around. Luckily there were no other drivers around as he made the U-turn and went down the street he’d passed previously.
Two blocks down, he knew he’d made the right decision. There, on the deserted sidewalk, was Sam, walking barefoot. This small street was one-way and barely big enough for his Crown Vic. Once Derek caught up to her, he put the car in park and put on the hazards as he got out. “Sam!” he called, but she didn’t stop her staggering walk.
He jogged to get ahead of her. “Sam!” he called again. Still no response. She didn’t look hurt, though. Her vacant eyes looked straight ahead and she didn’t seem to be paying any attention to what her bare feet could be stepping on.
“Come on, Sam. It’s me.” He reached out for her arm and finally got her attention, but not in a good way. She pulled her arm from his grip and set her palm against his chest for one brief second, which was all it took before he was thrown across the street until he slammed into a parked car.
His breath was knocked out of him as he fell onto the ground. By the time the street stopped spinning, Sam was already halfway up the block. “Sam,” he said, but all he managed out was a harsh croak. Derek pushed himself up and looked at the retreating form of his... whatever Sam was.
He took a few deep breaths and then tried once more, this time putting everything he had into the scream. “SAM!”
He thought he’d been fooling himself, but she froze in place before she pivoted around on a foot to face him. He smiled. “I knew there had to be some part of you still there.”
Sam started to walk toward him, but her strides were too square, too steady. He immediately knew he’d miscalculated. “Samantha Harris isn’t here,” she said. “She’s not coming back. There’s nothing you can do to get her back. She belongs to us now.”
As she approached, he reached down and felt the butt of his gun but couldn’t bring himself to pull it out. No matter what happened, he wasn’t going to shoot Sam. “Who is ‘us’? What do you want with her?”
Sam finally reached him and stopped about a foot away. Close enough to be dangerous, his aching ribs were sure of that. “We want what everyone wants. We want freedom.”
“What about Sam. Doesn’t she get freedom?”
Sam narrowed her eyes. “Stay out of our way. You don’t need to be a casualty. You can’t stop us. You can shoot her, but we will live on. There’s nothing you can do. This is our body. We like this body. You can’t have it back.”
Whoever he was talking to was right. He wasn’t going to shoot Sam. So he did the only other thing he could think of. His fist shot out as fast as he could, slamming his knuckles into the bone of Sam’s face. He didn’t let himself think about Sam. All he saw was the darkness that had taken her over.
Sam collapsed onto the concrete street before Derek had a chance to catch her. For a few long seconds, Derek stood over her prone body as he weighed his options.
There was only one person he could think to ask for help. Fuck. He might not survive this night after all.
“Let me in,” demanded Derek.
The man in front of the door managed to look flustered, which Derek considered a win. He was willing to bet that he was trained very well to avoid letting any strangers into the building. He also probably knew that the unconscious woman currently in Derek’s arms was Claudia’s granddaughter and that turning him away wasn’t a good idea. “I need to
—”
“Let. Me. In,” he repeated, letting the threat drip from his words. “If this girl wakes up before we get to Claudia Harris, we’re probably all going to die. Now move aside.”
Instead of moving aside, the sentry unclipped his phone from his belt holder and his fingers moved frantically over the screen. After a moment, “I’m sorry for disturbing you, ma’am, but you need to— Yes, right away.” The sentry turned around and held open the door. “Follow me.”
The lobby to the building owned by one of the most powerful witches he knew of wasn’t all that different from most of the lobbies in the city. Pretty, sure, but nothing to make him think there was anything sinister going on.
But Derek didn’t have time to take in the details. In seconds, he was inside an elevator and the sentry was pressing an incredibly long code into a keypad. Sam stirred in his arms and Derek studied her carefully to make sure she wasn’t about to regain consciousness. He was glad she was on the verge of waking up because that meant he didn’t hit her too hard, but considering his side was going to hurt for weeks thanks to the little push she gave him in the alley, he’d hate to think what she’d do to him in this confined elevator.
The door opened and Claudia Harris was standing right there. “Bring her here.” She turned and strode from the elevator, not waiting to see whether Derek was following.
Derek obediently went down the hallway and turned in the second door. The building seemed like an office building from downstairs, but from this level it looked like a mix between a personal residence and workspace. The finishes were dark hardwood floors and burgundy walls. Not like any office he’d been in.
The room he turned into had two couches pushed against the far walls, which were covered with bookshelves, and a desk closer to the full-length windows. It looked as if the couches used to be closer to the center of the room, but had been cleared aside.
“Put her there.” Claudia pointed to the empty space provided by the cleared away furniture.
“On the floor?”
Claudia gave him an angry glare and he didn’t question her again as he bent down to set Sam down as gently as possible. He didn’t have any free hands, so he winced as her head hit the hard floor. Even going as slow as possible, it seemed too hard for him.
“Hurry,” said Claudia, apparently not as concerned as him.
Derek moved the rest of her weight off his arms and then stepped aside. Claudia had a glass jar in her hand filled with something he couldn’t identify. But then she started to pour the contents out in a circle around Sam. It looked like black sand. “What is that?”
“It will trap the darkness,” she said, noticeably not answering the question. Once she finished the circle around Sam, she held her hand out to him. “Come here.”
That was the last thing he wanted to do, but he had to work under the assumption that Claudia’s disapproval of him was being put on the sidelines for the moment. He walked around the circle and stood at the perimeter with Claudia. “What do you need me to do?”
“Stand still.” She reached over for his hand. He didn’t know why she thought he was going anywhere, but then she pulled a knife out of her waistband and things started to make more sense. He forced his normal questioning nature aside as she brought the blade closer to his skin and poked the tip of his middle finger.
Derek bit back a curse. Of course she was going to stab him. Why would he expect anything different? She then turned his hand over and squeezed his finger until a few drops of blood spilled out and hit the sand surrounding Sam. Immediately, a steaming smoke started to rise from the entire circle. “You needed blood?”
“Blood of the righteous,” said Claudia absently as she left him to start pulling books off the bookshelves.
He decided not to press the idea that he was righteous.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” she ordered as she kept on searching for whatever she was looking for.
“I don’t really know. We were at the reception and had no luck finding anyone to make the bracelet alarm go off. I was pulled aside and we got separated. It wasn’t more than a few minutes and I told her not to go anywhere, but then it all went downhill.”
“But you found the person who did this? The one who has been killing us?”
“It was James Reyes.”
Claudia stopped her search to look at him questioningly. “Who?”
“He’s not even a witch. He was the cop who came with me to talk to Tommy Collins. Collins threw him over the stairwell and he ended up paralyzed.”
A sort of recognition dawned on Claudia’s face.
“What? What do you know that I don’t?”
“I went to Tommy’s apartment. The darkness was festering there. It had infected every inch of that place. If this officer was lying there helpless, that would give the darkness all the opportunity it needed to get a hold of him. He never stood a chance.”
“But he’s not a witch. This dark magic can make anyone it wants go crazy?”
“No. It’s not that easy. But when the circumstances permit themselves, it will take advantage. That’s what it does. It takes advantage. It preys on weakness. It promises things like revenge and riches that it can never deliver. It’s only too late that the person it’s been using realizes that they’re nothing more than a pawn.”
“It promised Reyes that it would kill every witch to give him justice for what happened. So if it wasn’t killing witches for Reyes, what does it want?”
Claudia pulled out a book and flipped through a few of the pages. “This is what I was looking for. How did this James Reyes infect Samantha?”
“Like I said, I wasn’t there. I realized she was gone, and Reyes started talking crazy and I found the bracelet on the ground. So I ran out and found her. After she threw me around a bit, I, uh, subdued her, and you were the first person I thought to bring her to.”
“How did you manage to subdue her?”
Derek winced. “I hit her.”
Claudia looked up from the book and glared at him. “You hit my granddaughter?”
“She threw me against a car,” he said weakly. “Can you help her or not? The way she was talking... it sounded like there was no way to get her back.”
“There’s a way to get the darkness out.” She flipped a few more pages.
But Derek could see through the calmness. “You’re scared,” he said.
“I’ve never done this before, if that’s what you mean.” She looked up and met his eyes. “But it takes a lot more than this to scare me.”
“No. Sam threw me across a street. Hard. Something that little charm inside me didn’t stop. That means whatever this darkness is, it’s stronger than your magic. And that scares you.”
Claudia snapped the book shut. “You know, that charm doesn’t protect you from me either. Maybe you’re the one who should be afraid.”
“Save Sam,” he said. “After she’s back to herself, I’ll worry about myself.”
The elevator dinged before Claudia could respond and they both took a step away from each other. On some level, he knew that this wasn’t someone who he needed to give any more reason to dislike him. But the other part knew that she was the reason he almost died and he wasn’t about to show her any weakness or fear. It wasn’t in his nature.
Claudia took the book over toward the circle and set it right outside the sand. It was no longer smoking, but Derek assumed that the barrier was still in place. Bastian walked into the room as Claudia flipped the book open to a certain page. Derek couldn’t read whatever language the book was in, but he could see a basic drawing of an oval with a person in the center.
“Bastian, Detective, I’ll need you to hold her down.”
Bastian immediately stepped over the sand and knelt next to Sam. No questions asked. No hesitation.
Derek sighed as he followed suit and went to the other side of Sam. “Are you going to hurt her?”
“I’m going to forcefully eject an evil essence that’s taking over h
er soul. It’s not going to feel pleasant.”
Maybe there was a reason Bastian didn’t ask questions. Because the answers sucked.
“I’m going to start at her feet and work my way up.” Claudia knelt at the other side of Sam. “As I move up, you will need to move out of my way while still holding her down. No matter what. Understand?”
Bastian and he both set a firm hand on Sam’s shoulders, pressing her firmly against the ground. She groaned slightly at the new pressure but didn’t wake up. Derek glanced at the few inches between the edge of his foot and the sand circle. “We’re not protected from inside here, are we?”
“In a few seconds, she’s not going to be able to focus any of the darkness.” Claudia took a deep breath. “Here we go.” Even though she had the book open next to her, she didn’t look at it. She held her hands, one on top of the other, both facing down, over Sam’s bare feet and then the chant started. He couldn’t tell the language, and if someone asked him to repeat it back, he didn’t think he could. It seemed to roll off her tongue as though it were natural to her.
At first, nothing happened. It seemed as if she were a crazy woman speaking a dead language in the middle of the room for no reason. But in seconds that all changed.
Sam’s eyes snapped open and she lurched forward. Bastian’s and Derek’s hold on her managed to keep her down, but just barely. Considering how big they both were and how small she was, that was saying something.
Except her feet didn’t move. Claudia moved her hands from the feet to the calves; whatever she was doing seemed to be working—or else she would’ve been kicked in the face a few times over.
Sam kept on struggling and screamed, but no actual words. It was as if whatever force was inside her was panicking under the assault. Good. He wanted it to panic.
As Claudia reached her stomach, Sam’s eyes widened as though she was in pain and instead of fighting, her body started to shake. Not just a soft tremble, but a violent tremor as though she were seizing. Derek kept on looking between Claudia and Bastian, trying to see whether either of them were freaking out like him, but both seemed utterly calm, as though this happened every day.
